"Is Your 15mm Mars Action Underground Or Terraformed?" Topic

Watching Total Recall (1990) again now. Watched Ghosts of Mars (2001) last night.

It got me thinking about a little detail … of the air.

Dan

Wow great question! I have always thought about my Mars as already terra formed with action above and below kind of like the movie "The Ghost of Mars" with railways and all.

A Terraformed Mars is by far the easiest terrain option, of course.

Dan

Well, always 28mm for me--but also always the Percival Lowell Mars of Burroughs and Brackett, with canals, dead cities and a population human enough to have sex with.

Terraformed or underground, Mars is just one more SF planet. But pre-space probe Mars was one of the greatest adventure settings in literature, with its own legendary cities, tribes, games and vices. No movie yet to equal "The Road to Sinharat" and I don't think there's going to be.

Ha! That's one more thing to add to my reading list.

Dan
link

Robert: "and a population human enough to have sex with"

LOL. A couple of scenes from Galaxy Quest suddenly come to mind. :)

Dan
YouTube link

Thanks for the inspiration Dan!

Why not have both? – underground for pre-terraforming and i'm sure the undergroundtunnels etc could be put to good use post terraforming as service conduits, storage spaces machine shops etc just like the maintenance networks under certain well known theme parks

Taking it a bit further you could have them as the living quarters of the lower status/underclass of citizens (think Babylon 5 "lurkers") who may be wont to rise up against their "betters" in a manner similar to Edgar Friendly and his associates in Demolition Man….

Hmm….you've got me thinking now….How about "Iron Sky" on Mars – Eureka do the appropriate bad guys….

link

p.s. did you end up getting any of those 15mm East Germans? If so how did they turn out

TonicNH: "Why not have both? – underground for pre-terraforming and i'm sure the undergroundtunnels etc could be put to good use post terraforming"

Now that's really good thinking!

Dan
PS. As for the East Germans … I might put off buying those minis for a bit. We've been back home 3 weeks and I'm still finding miniatures (and buildings) I thought had been lost forever. In all the chaos of the post-flood cleanup, some were put in boxes together with regular kitchen and household items.

Dan, not to put down Secret of Sinharat, but "Road to Sinharat" is different. It was Brackett's next to last Mars story. The astronomical evidence was already coming in--not decisive yet, but discouraging--and the market for space opera was shrinking. So she did a sort of travelogue. The story moves from Martian cities, down the canals and out into the high desert to a lost city, using up all the classic Martian settings. You can find it in The Coming of the Terrans, I think.

Ah. And so your link says. Someday I will read before I write. But your link complains about the covers on the English-language Brackett books. He misses our best. See the Gollancz Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories, which also includes "Road." I will pay $50 USD for a poster based on that cover.

I would fight surface battles on Mars as it exists now. This book shows how to do it.

link

Ian Douglas is really William H. Keith of Battletech fame and is a great writer. This book has a lot of action on Mars with space suited marines from the US and the European Union slugging it out over some isolated colonies and xeno archaeological sites. It's a fun blend of hard sci-fi and "Chariot of the Gods" with the fate of humanity at stake. There is also a wonderful, and more realistic, version of Moonraker's space battle in it as the two sides clash over the International Space Station.

Great stuff!

It would seem to me that gaming in an underground enviroment might quickly degenerate into a glorified dungeon crawl. That is room to room or cavern to cavern. Not a lot of room for tactics or maneuver.

Dave

Lol. And if they use "domes", they better be made out of some bulletproof material.

Dan

I like the idea of tunnels as connections to other point and using them as housing and shops as well or as storage area, I think in would be great to have underground train systems as well.

Why not a third option?

Surface dwelling in hab structures?

-Eli

Eli,

Do you mean terraformed, like in Ghosts Of Mars? Or do you mean surface dwellings with airlocks and lots of space suits?

Dan

Mine is Terraformed … link

Reading all of this, I think I'm going to go with terraformed with train tracks both surface and underground, with additional tunnels for storage, which later on is used for living quarters and shops.

So initially the main hub has surface sprawl with branches and tunnel underground which spans out to other mining and factory facilities.

Then as the terra forming takes hold more structures, road and train rails are laid in.

But of course the main hub is still the main starport and maintains most of the control of supplies coming in.

In my world, Mars is being mined, but is also the jumping point to asteroid belt mining, to which asteroids are hauled back to Mars to be process and used on Mars and and more materials sent back to earth.